Wankerdom: Trainspotting As a Rejection of the Postcolonial?

People of Scottish descent are usually proud about their history and their achievements. . . . They can recite many names and details in the familiar story of their people. "Braveheart" William Wallace and Robert the Bruce; the Arbroath Declaration and Mary Queen of Scots; Robert Burns and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

—Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World

The experience of defeat, followed by enforced union, changed forever the relationship . . . to England . . . never again could the Scots deceive themselves that the English lacked the will or the means to conquer them.

—John Robertson, quoted in Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited

Long before and long after the "enforced union" of 1707, Scots from across the ideological spectrum have come to recognize that they are—despite occasional pretenses and denials to the contrary—a people "colonized" by the English. From William Wallace's "braveheart" struggle against Edward I in the early fourteenth century to the Highland chieftain Rob Roy's quest for honor against the Duke of Montrose some three hundred years later, from Robertson's critiques to the verse of Jacobite poet laureate Robbie Burns, from the maverick politicking of Tom Johnson early in the twentieth century to the contemporary work of Tom Nairn, the Scots have battled gamely but unsuccessfully against domination from the South. Ruled by England yet part of Britain, the Scots have historically struggled between the desire for autonomy and independence from and the reality of assimilation and integration into Westminister.

To add yet another paradox, Wallace's people have been colonized by the Anglos yet are complicit in the colonizing project of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which turned on what Nairn phrases as "imperial alignment with England," an entanglement which rendered "ethno-national liberation difficult" (18). While chafing at the bit of Anglo imperialism in the British Isles, the Scots functioned as "junior partners in the Empire's vestigial trading spoils," as Andrew Ross put it, assisting in the extension of English rule to Africa, the pillaging of the Caribbean, and the exploitation of Asia. Located in the interstices between inveterate opposition to the English and interpellation into Britishness, the Scots have, in the poetically acerbic terms of cultural historian Christopher Harvie, displayed the schizophrenic tendency of wanting to "run with the ethnic hare and hunt with the imperial hounds" (22).

A nation, according to Nairn, "managed" but never ruled by a native middle class deeply tied to Westminister, Scotland has always been a nation without a state (Nairn 187). Or, as David McCrone so damningly puts it, Scotland is a "stateless nation" (quoted in Nairn 204). The Scots have historically imagined themselves as a geographically and culturally autonomous people but they have not been able to secure independence, rendering them a peculiar institution, the stateless nation, an internal colony within the British state which clings precariously to its "difference" from England. Scotland is a uniquely constituted polity in which "civil society [is] divorced from political nationalism," producing a powerful identity rooted in the Kirk (Scottish Presbyterianism), Celtic paraphernalia, the Scottish brogue, and the intense animosity displayed at England-Scotland football games (according to James Kellas, Scottish "working class nationalism is generally related to culture and football, not politics") (Harvie 4, 19). Scottish identity has become the vehicle for a complex, ambivalently articulated sense of national self. Addressing the centrality of the Kirk to Scottish identity, Arthur Herman writes, the "fundamentalist Kirk . . . actually laid the foundations for modern Scotland, in surprising and striking ways. In fact, without an appreciation of Scotland's Presbyterian legacy, the story of the Scots' place in modern civilization would be incomplete" (Herman 10).

If, as Kellas and Nairn argue ("Scotland has opted out of the ‘oppression of politics'; and out of its opportunities and collective rewards as well"), politics has served Scottish nationalism badly, it is appropriate that we should take the pulse of contemporary Scotland culturally (Nairn 204). The failed, pathological condition of...